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The Great Man in Eclipse

Monday, 2. February 2015 - 13:39

In 2010, the Russia-born author Alexandra Popoff published a biography of Sophia Tolstoy, the wife of the great novelist, that turned the long-accepted view of Sophia on its head. In Tolstoy’s later years, Sophia had come to be seen by a great many of his admirers as a jealous shrew and a pampered aristocrat whose petty materialism kept her mighty husband from living out his vision of a simple life without money and property. Her irrational paranoia became so insufferable, it was implied, that Tolstoy saw no other way out than to flee his own home at the age of 82, a quixotic journey that would culminate with his death at the stationmaster’s house in Astapovo in November 1910. Drawing on a trove of new archival material, including Sophia’s unpublished memoir and correspondence, Ms. Popoff shattered this facile caricature and presented a woman not seen before—a loving wife and mother, a tireless amanuensis, literary agent and business manager devoted to her husband’s career, and an ordinary woman trying to live with an impossibly difficult man whom the entire world considered to be a saint. Being the spouse of a “Great Man” was rarely so trying.

Ms. Popoff’s “Tolstoy’s False Disciple” ought to be seen as the bookend to her biography of Sophia: Having earlier set out to resurrect the reputation of Tolstoy’s wife, she has now set out to bury the reputation of the man considered to have been Tolstoy’s most ardent follower. Tolstoy was already a famous novelist when, in 1883, he met Vladimir Chertkov, a former officer in the imperial guards who was 26 years his junior. Chertkov, born into a wealthy and prominent noble family, was tall and handsome, known in the capital’s fashionable homes as “le beau Dima.” It was a difficult time in Tolstoy’s life. After a spiritual crisis, he had given up writing fiction and turned his attention to matters of religion, but his new writings had failed to find an audience. Chertkov was himself preoccupied with the same questions, and the two men immediately formed an intense bond.
Chertkov soon went from being one of Tolstoy’s many acolytes to his closest friend and confidant. Over the course of the next three decades, Tolstoy wrote him more than 930 letters—more than he wrote to anyone else. Ms. Popoff constructs her revelatory and deeply disturbing account of their relationship by drawing upon these letters, kept in Moscow’s Tolstoy Museum, as well as on Chertkov’s papers in the Russian State Library, to which few researchers have had access.

Far from an innocent admirer and promoter of Tolstoy’s teachings, the Chertkov that emerges in Ms. Popoff’s book is a manipulative and unscrupulous figure intent on gaining complete control over the man he claimed to be serving. Through flattery, guile and force of will, Chertkov made himself the sole representative of Tolstoy’s works outside Russia, and he managed to obtain a monopoly on Tolstoy’s latest and most profitable writings. Chertkov also wrung from Tolstoy the sole right to copy his diaries and his entire correspondence. And he did not stop there. From around 1890, Chertkov began to edit Tolstoy’s works and even to tell him what to write. He hired secretaries for his patron and then forced them to act as his spies, insisting that he be informed of everything Tolstoy did and said and everyone he met with. Toward the end of the writer’s life, Chertkov decided who would be permitted access to Tolstoy.

Chertkov’s baleful influence has been noted by others before, but Ms. Popoff’s book is the most damning indictment to date. Chertkov intruded into the most intimate affairs of the Tolstoy family; nothing, he felt, should be outside his purview. “If Chertkov loved Tolstoy, his love was selfish, obsessive and pathological,” Ms. Popoff writes. After exerting unrelenting pressure on Tolstoy, Chertkov even persuaded him to sign a secret will that made Chertkov the lone executor of Tolstoy’s literary estate. The target of this secrecy was Sophia, the only person capable of stopping Chertkov. She saw through his machinations, and her inability to open her husband’s eyes to them nearly drove her mad. In one of his wickedest tricks, Chertkov forced her to submit to a psychiatric examination that found her to be suffering from paranoia and hysteria. Chertkov made certain to publicize the doctor’s findings.

What makes the story so painful is the extent to which Tolstoy cooperated. The man who had stood up to the despotism of Russian autocracy and the dogmatism of the Orthodox Church was incapable of resisting the petty despotism of his disciple—in fact, he encouraged it, filling his letters to Chertkov with nasty and unfair criticisms of his wife and children. Having denounced Sophia as cruel for wanting a wet nurse (she bore him 13 children), Tolstoy condoned Chertkov’s wife for using one and actually went out of his way to help her find one. While complaining to Chertkov that his wife’s materialism made him a prisoner, Tolstoy never once made mention of Chertkov’s owning three estates and his love of expensive things.

Just why a man like Tolstoy felt so completely under Chertkov’s spell remains something of a mystery. Were they, perhaps, lovers? As Ms. Popoff notes, their “love-friendship correspondence . . . suggests their relationship was homoerotic,” and Sophia was convinced that their relationship was physical. Without ruling this out, the author finds the most logical answer in the deficiencies of Tolstoy’s character. He admitted once to Sophia that there was “a weak man in me” who loved the flattery and attention that Chertkov showered upon him, even if he knew it to be less than honest. “Perhaps, it’s because you praise me so much,” Tolstoy wrote to Chertkov in 1910, speculating about why he had wept over Chertkov’s recent letter, “but I hope it’s because I love you so much.”

Douglas Smith

Source: 
www.wsj.com
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Alexandra Popoff
biography of Sophia Tolstoy